Latin Waves is celebrating its 10th year on the air, our original mandate to cover Latin America still stands but we have expanded our coverage into local/national and international issues making those critical political connections, we bring our listeners in-depth coverage of issues with a focus on the history of an issue and what that history means for us today and most importantly what we can do to move society forward in a healthy way.

In short our show is focused on building community across borders, positive social change has only come through communities of interest working together.

**This interview aired in 2011 and is still relevant today, Sister Kelleher passed on Aug 16 2013 and her life continues to be an inspiration to all***Gives us all something to think about at this time of year**

We speak to Sister Elizabeth Kelleher, an 85 year old nun with the Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement, we talk about her efforts to stop more gentrification in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside the poorest postal code in Canada.

Sister Elizabeth is a pillar in the Downtown Eastside where she tirelessly gives of her time and continues to be a source of inspiration for many, many people. She operates a soup kitchen that feeds between 300 and 500 of the city’s most poverty stricken each day.

It is estimated that there are over 10,000 homeless people in BC , of which 32 percent are aboriginal, and amongst women, 50 percent. A homeless person dies every 12 days in B.C. Conservative Estimates put the national homeless numbers at close to 300,000. The annual cost of homelessness in Canada in 2007 was approximately $4.5 to $6 billion in emergency services, community organizations, and non-profits. The cost both financially and morally of doing nothing is tremendous. Canada is the only G8 country without a national housing plan or poverty reduction strategy.

Latin Waves host Sylvia Richardson is interviewed by Charles Boylan from Vancouver’s Co-op Radio, she speaks about her new book Fleshmapping, Cartography of Struggle, Renewal and Hope in Education

Sylvia L. Richardson is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She is the host and producer of the internationally syndicated radio program Latin Waves.

A Brief Book synopsis
What can be learned from a story woven out of fragmented moments of joy, pain, horror, and blissful awareness? Flesh Mapping is an attempt to create a pedagogy of shared narrative, place, and politics; to narratively map the injuries of the material, emotional, and spiritual impact of poverty, displacement, hunger and war on an individual life.

The book is an invitation to instructors in education, anthropology, women’s studies, and labor studies to re-imagine education as the praxis for liberation, renewal, and hope. It serves as a process of naming the injuries inflicted on real bodies by privilege and power, like sites on a map. The goal is not simply to name and make visible privilege but to simultaneously create emergent spaces of dissonance in education that can challenge and transform power at the site where the personal is political.

Latin waves host Sylvia Richardson speaks with Robert Jensen about our “dead culture” of state Fundamentalism.

Jensen says that absolute beliefs that ignore life’s complexities are used to support the politics of empire. He gives examples of these, including market fundamentalism (capitalism), moral fundamentalism (of spreading ‘democracy’), or technological fundamentalism – the belief that technology will solve the environmental problems it causes.

Jensen claims that capitalist fundamentalism is in fact incompatible with Christianity, which. like many the other great religions, are calls to recognize the universal human family. He describes alternative types of power that can lead to a hopeful future.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity” (City Lights Books), his latest book is All my bones Shake.

A tribute to Eduardo Galeano , he passed on April 13, 2015, this interview originally aired Sep 2009 but still relevant today.

Eduardo Galeano , Poet and prolific author of several books including his famous Open Veins of Latin America and his latest Mirrors an almost universal history talks about the need for community and communion with nature.

Sylvia Richardson of Latin Waves Interviews Dana Lyons on his latest album the Great Salish Sea, Dana speaks about the need for citizens to protect this pristine coast from Coal, Oil exports and how this is already happening in Oregon and Washington State.

Songs, The Great Salish Sea, The Salmon Come Home, Sometimes, It’s a Matter of Asking. Visit

For two decades veteran photojournalist David Bacon has documented the connections between labor, migration, and the global economy. In Illegal People Bacon explores the human side of globalization, exposing the many ways it uproots people in Latin America and Asia, driving them to migrate. At the same time, U.S. immigration policy makes the labor of those displaced people a crime in the United States. Illegal People explains why our national policy produces even more displacement, more migration, more immigration raids, and a more divided, polarized society.

Sylvia speaks to David about the upcoming US elections, the candidates and the issues and how to build social movements beyond the election.

David E. Kirkland is a trans-disciplinary scholar of English and urban education, who explores the intersections among urban youth culture, language and literacy, urban teacher preparation, and digital media. He analyzes culture, language, and texts, and has expertise in critical literary, ethnographic, and sociolinguistic research methods.

He has received many awards for his work, including the 2008 AERA Division G Outstanding Dissertation Award and was a 2009-10 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and is a former fellow of NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices. Dr. Kirkland has published widely. His most recent articles include: ” Black Skin, White Masks’: Normalizing Whiteness and the Trouble with the Achievement Gap” in urban contexts: Politics, Pluralism, and Possibilities” (English Education), and “We real cool: Examining Black males and literacy” (Reading Research Quarterly). He is currently completing his fourth book, A Search Past Silence, to be published through Teacher College Press s Language and Literacy Series. Dr. Kirkland believes that, in their language and literacies, youth take on new meanings beginning with a voice and verb, where words when spoken or written have the power to transform the world inside-out

Sylvia Richardson speaks with Jorge Martin from of Hands of Venezuela, they speak about the upcoming US elections and what that means for Latin America. Lessons learned in Venezuela and how to move forward with progressive movements in the future.

Derrick Jensen is an American author and environmental activist (and critic of mainstream environmentalism). Jensen has published several books questioning and critiquing modern civilization and its values, including The Culture of Make Believe and Endgame. He has also taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University.

Latin Waves host Sylvia Richardson speaks with author Derrick Jensen on the’naturality’ of hierarchy and our culture of violation. Exploring alternative ways of being. Jensen turns the corrosive narrative of hierarchy (survival of the fittest) on its head and offers a new path of coexistence.
** Plus a short talk at the end by Noam Chomsky titled “Necessary Illusions”

We speak to Dr Darren Lund, Dr. Lund is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary, where his research examines social justice activism in schools and communities. Since the 1980s Darren has published over 230 articles, poems, books, and book chapters; his most recent books are co-edited with Dr. Paul Carr: He speaks about his most recent book The Great White North? Exploring Whiteness, Privilege and Identity in Education
Dr Lund has a frank discussion about the challenges of teaching privilege to students who can t even recognize their own privilege, he speaks about the need to problematize the classroom taking take students out of their comfort zones.